ABSTRACT
Aside from the works of Ovid and Italian poems with which Shakespeare’s acquaintance is only a possibility, there had been English experiments of the kind in ques tion, coming to view at just the time of his apprenticeship. Of these the most important are Thomas Lodge’s Meta morphosis of Scylla and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. The former poem treats of the Ovidian story of the sea-god Glaucus and the nymph Scylla, but alters its source by introducing a scene in which the nymph, smitten by Cupid’s darts after a long period of coldness, herself woos the now disdainful god with hopeless passion. Incidentally it makes use of the device of the mocking echo which Shake speare-and many another Elizabethan poet-adopted as an ingenious embellishment of his story. Lodge’s poem had been published in 1589. Hero and Leander, on the other hand, remained unpublished (and unfinished) until 1598, but there is little doubt that Shakespeare shared in the considerable circulation it must have had in manu script form. Almost at the opening of this tale is a description of Hero’s dress, the sleeves embroidered
and a little later Adonis is called “ rose-cheeked,” the epithet which Shakespeare borrowed for his opening lines. These were not the only passages in contemporary poetry which he may have found suggestive for his treatment of the tale of Adonis. Robert Greene, for example, had introduced into his romance of Perimedesi a song telling how
and how the boy blushed at her kisses, Spenser, in his elegy of Astrophel commemorating the death of Sidney, had adapted the legend of Venus’ weeping over the beauti ful body of the dead youth, and the flower which sprang from the place where he lay. And it is quite possible that there was already in circulation a poem of Henry Con stable’s (not published, apparently, until some years after Yenus and Adonis), so close to Shakespeare’s that, which ever was earlier, we may be certain one borrowed from the other:
All this, then, and more which might be added, makes clear the frankly imitative character of “ the first heir” of Shakespeare’s “ invention.” Drawing thus, as he and his contemporaries were accustomed to do, from all acces sible storehouses, he worked up the story of Venus’ love for the beautiful boy to a narrative of nearly twelve hundred lines, in fluent and limpid verse, enriched with every device of decorative phrasing, in which the passion of the queen of passion is portrayed as dispassionately as one could conceive possible. There are lascivious touches, to be sure, characteristic both of the sensualism of youth and of Elizabethan taste; but they remind us of the weaving of such matters into carved friezes, or the tracery upon a silver bowl, having neither the vivid human reality of Marlowe’s more earthly creatures in Hero and Leander nor that of many rich-blooded lovers whom Shakespeare was later to bring into being. Hence, as Coleridge ob served, “ though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account.” Indeed, as we proceed with the encounter, we presently find Adonis breaking into a moral discourse very un-Ovidian and un-Italian, on the difference between love and lust:
Strange doctrine, this, for a poem primarily devoted to Yenus! It is not introduced, we may be sure, for any consciously ethical end, but only because, in developing Adonis’ opposition to Venus, the poet fell naturally into a strain of characteristically English quality; for English taste has always been easily moved, even on the esthetic side, by moral distinctions.
